Yesterday, the New York Times ran a preview of today’s planned big announcements by Donald Trump, most of which seek to focus on national security. According to NYT, Trump will today sign an executive order directing the construction of his famed, proposed wall along the border with Mexico while making an appearance at the Department of Homeland Security; ironically just as Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray arrives in Washington. He’s also expected to sign orders that will limit the number of refugees that can re-settle to the U.S. while blocking those from Syria and other “terror prone” nations around the world.
To his supporters, all of these sound like great ideas, despite most of them being terrible ideas or, ideas that are at the very least totally unnecessary.
Bernouts love to point to Denmark as an example of how all countries, especially the USA, should operate; what with its massive welfare state and soul-crushing taxation. What the Bernouts never bothered to figure out is why they themselves don’t just go live in Denmark; and, it’s because Denmark wouldn’t have them. What Leftists can’t comprehend is that the height of a nation’s border walls – be they legal, physical or a combination of the two – is dictated by the extent of its welfare state. As Denmark puts roughly everyone on the dole, their economy can’t handle an influx of people who’d immediately sink to the bottom of the “to” end of the economic thievery that is socialism, without any additional wealth being generated by the poor bastards on the “from” end. This is unsustainable in any economy, particularly one as small as Denmark’s.
It’s unsustainable in even a massive economy like that of the United States, but due to the sheer size of our economy, the government can try to “hide” the devastating damage immigration causes. Make no mistake, however, part of the reason for the crippling expense of Obamacare is because we’re all paying for a lot of health care being provided to people who are not in this country legally to begin with and therefore pay zero taxes into the system they’re raping to death.
Of course, one way of trying to protect the money Americans are forced at gunpoint to waste on other people’s healthcare bills is to make sure fewer illegal immigrants are coming over to cash in on America’s coerced altruism. And, in a country the size of Denmark, such a border security system might make sense. In a country that spans the breadth of a continent with borders as long, a physical barrier to immigration, i.e. a wall, makes exactly no sense – and hell knows the legal barriers are about as impermeable as a broken window. Where the border is physically fortified now, Mexican drug cartels have tunneled under it in scores of places. Where the fence is high and relatively unwatched, they’ve used catapults to launch bales of marijuana across into the USA (it looks more like a sort of trebuchet to me).
Obviously, the idea of securing a population behind walls goes back to ancient times, and from the moment humans put them up, other humans figured out ways of defeating them, including tunnels and catapults.
Instead of igniting a medieval arms race with Mexican drug cartels, the Trump administration has at its disposal infinitely more effective means of discouraging illegal immigration and at the same time mitigating its deleterious effects on us all.
Step #1: End the war on drugs. Surprise! Just like ending the problem of inner city violence, the problem of police violence against blacks and the problem of cops stealing more things from civilians than burglars do all comes down to ending the drug war, America could also solve a huge portion of its border woes by doing so. That any group would be willing to resurrect late medieval siege engines to get pot into the USA ought to tell us that the market for the product here is very large and is not going away anytime soon. The federal government has already pissed away a trillion dollars over 40 years fighting this plant, and the plant keeps winning. It’s time to give up that fight and end restrictions on all other drugs. This will bankrupt the Mexican cartels overnight and take away much of their incentive for trying to come across the border to begin with.
Step #2: End all government entitlement programs. All of them. Welfare, section 8 housing, cash assistance, food stamps, free medical care, all of it. If immigrants know the only thing they’ll have when they try to start life anew in the USA is whatever they brought with them and the kindness of their neighbors, we’ll only likely get people coming here that actually want to make something of themselves; something other than a leech, that is. That’s the kind of immigration our country, any country, needs.
Step #3: Borders? What for? Now that there’s nothing here for immigrants to steal, there’s no harm whatsoever in letting people and goods move freely across all borders. This sort of freedom will benefit everyone involved. A taco truck on every corner? Yes, please!
There, solved in three easy steps.
Borders and nations and welfare states are all trappings of government, none of those things would exist without it. Having government means having these problems to deal with; which only goes to further illustrate the sheer madness of having government to begin with. Fact is, we appear to be stuck with having to live with government for the foreseeable future. Given that bleak fact, the least government could do is attempt to be semi-responsible and decent stewards of our money and the trust – blind as it is – that goes with it. Of course, governments don’t ever behave thusly, which is why we can expect this regime to make a problem worse while spending lots of our money in the process; kind of like when Obama tried to “fix” the health insurance industry.
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